The internet has large amounts of data distributed over a multitude of computers, thereby providing users with massive quantities of information on varying topics. This is also true for a number of other communication networks, such as intranets and extranets. Finding specific information from such large amounts of data can be difficult.
Search engines have been developed to address the problem of finding specific information on large networks. For example, a user can enter one or more search terms into a search engine and the search engine will return a list of network locations (e.g., uniform resource locators (URLs)) that the search engine has determined contain relevant information.